ABSTRACT
T he twenty-one commissions described in this and the next chapter rep-resent a broad range of institutions. This list of twenty-one is probably not an exhaustive list, but it certainly includes the great majority and the most important of them to date.1 The list is growing rapidly: in mid-1999, both Nigeria and Sierra Leone announced the formation of truth commissions, the former through presidential decree shortly after the end of military rule, and the latter agreed to in the peace agreement that ended a nine-year civil war. At the beginning of the year 2000, at least a half dozen additional countries were considering their own truth commissions.
